When comparing foobar2000 vs Song Director, the Slant community recommends foobar2000 for most people. In the question“What are the best music players for Windows?”foobar2000 is ranked 1st while Song Director is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose foobar2000 is:

Foobar200 has [over a hundred components](http://www.foobar2000.org/components) to choose from that add UI functionality, decoding support for various formats, etc.

Pros

Pro

Functionality can be extended with components

Pro

Lightweight

Foobar2000 has a clean, minimalistic UI, small filesize, and is light on resource usage.

Pro

Plugins can be used to bypass Windows mixer to output a bit-exact signal

Through the use of a plugin (of which there are three popular ones), users can get bit-exact sound output straight to their DAC or soundcard. While not something every user will use, for audiophiles this is a pretty important feature.

Pro

Transcodes all supported audio formats

The converter component allows foobar2000 to convert from and to any file formats that the player is capable of playing back.

Pro

ReplayGain support

ReplayGain can be applied on a per album or track basis, allowing the user to set up an even volumed listening experience.

Pro

Advanced layout

The player has a layout-editing mode that allows for a wide variety of UI setups.

Pro

Highly customisable

Pro

Variety of skins available

Browsing a site like DeviantArt will give you hundreds of skins (that have been made by other users) to choose from.

Pro

MP3 player management

Users can easily send their music files to their MP3 device through the use of the right click menu when browsing their library.

Pro

Skinnable

Foobar 2000 has powerful theming support.

Pro

Built-in support for Windows Media streaming

Foobar2000 can natively play ASX/MMS/RTSP streams.

Pro

Internal search is a beast

Foobar2000 provides an extensive search to look through your library. It supports special queries to only look for certain tags and other conditions and is incredibly fast in doing so even with over 20k of songs in your library.

Pro

Easy to use with powerful organization options

Song Director is easy to use due to the many tasks that can be completed with a click of a single button. It provides more extensive organizing and search capabilities than iTunes and WMP.

Pro

Customized play searches

Song Director allows for extensive sorting options such as the amount of beats per minute, bitrate, length, etc.

Pro

Automatically enters your information into a database

Pro

Locate songs or artists instantly

Pro

Edit songs without using File Explorer

Song Director permits the user to rename, copy a file, or move it to a different folder without having to search for it in File Explorer.

Pro

Create categories for your music

Pro

Press one button to do what you want

Pro

Can find and insert information about songs, artist, album art

Pro

Song Director will be adding new features with each new version

Pro

Can edit file tags

Pro

Compatible with Microsoft Windows

Song Director is compatible with Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and 10.

Cons

Con

Not easy to skin

Out of the box it looks like something out of win2000. It is also very difficult to skin for the normal user.

Con

Cumbersome start-up

Foobar2000 requires a bit of work to get it up and running.

Con

Provides little in terms of hand-holding

Advanced tasks such as skinning and installing components may be a bit intimidating for beginners because they require knowing your way around the computer, not just the player.

Con

The previous button doesn't work in random playback

You are unable to go back to a song when using random playback.

Con

Locks files and folders, making it hard to manage them

Several parts of Foobar lock files and folders in a way that they cannot be file-managed (move/copy/rename/delete) easily in the program (and externally). With the waveform plugin it's even worse. Cannot delete a file until the waveform is fully scanned.

Con

Breaks existing components every few updates

Makes it very hard to keep a customized version of Foobar running smoothly without worrying about non-working components.

Con

Outdated Plugins

Many, many plugins are outdated and not maintained for years, leading to stability issues with a lof of them. A rather complex SDK and missing sufficient documentation makes maintaining or creating new plugins unnecessarily hard.Getting to that neat GUI setup you've seen somewhere is probably impossible because of that.